Forging America: The History of Bethlehem Steel - Chapter 5

The end of Prohibition in 1933 further reduced mayhem, but the South Side would continue to be an unforgiving and dirty place. ''Here are the smoke-belching mills, coke plants and begrimed streets of the typical steel town,'' read the caption to a Bethlehem photo in the 1940 ''Guide to Pennsylvania.'' The guide was distributed by the federal government's Works Progress Administration, which provided jobs during the Depression.

Many steelworkers  hot, dirty and tired from their labors  didn't go directly home after their shifts, but to a multitude of corner barrooms where they often fought with one another. They were part of a work force that numbered 10,300 in 1929, the year the stock market crashed. As the Depression deepened, their ranks declined, from 9,500 in 1930, to 8,300 in 1931, to a low of 6,500 in 1933.

In the '20s, Bethlehem Steel had the opposite problem  more jobs to fill than people to fill them. But the company and other producers had a dilemma.

Steelmakers used vast numbers of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe to do unskilled labor. Right-wing groups fighting to keep foreigners out of the country pressured lawmakers to restrict immigration. Though the steelmakers lobbied against the so-called quota laws, Congress passed them in 1921 and 1924. About the same time, the Soviet Union and fascist Italy put their own restrictions on citizens who wanted to emigrate.

U.S. steel companies believed they had only two alternatives. They could employ blacks or Mexicans.

While steelmakers elsewhere turned to blacks to fill the lowest-paying jobs, Bethlehem Steel chose Mexicans. Grace noted that there was no restriction on immigration from Mexico. Also, few black men lived in the Lehigh Valley  there were only 558 in 1920  so they couldn't provide the manpower Bethlehem needed. There was the racial and ethnic stereotyping of the day, a prejudice that was blatant then and illegal today.

''The Mexicans are better, more dependable workers than the Negroes. The Negroes aren't there when you want them; they go south with the cold weather,'' one Bethlehem executive told sociologist Paul S. Taylor in 1929. Taylor didn't identify him.

Another executive ranked the Mexicans above blacks, but below Hungarians. ''We have had a more favorable experience with the Mexicans than with the Negroes, but not so favorable as, say with the Hungarians, who are more stable and dependable than the Mexicans.''

Bethlehem Steel saw other reasons not to hire blacks. With race riots and lynchings widespread across the country, Schwab and Grace would not have wanted to turn the South Side into a powder keg. Inside the plant, they didn't want to stir up trouble among other workers, who probably would be angry and resentful because blacks had been employed elsewhere as ''scabs,'' or strikebreakers.

Lehigh University urban planning professor David Amidon doesn't believe there was ''some conspiracy on the part of Bethlehem Steel not to hire blacks. I think because there were so few black people around, it did not dawn on them.''

Only about a thousand blacks lived in the Lehigh Valley in the early 1920s, compared to high numbers in other industrial centers. To this day, blacks still make up only a tiny percentage of the local population. About 18,500 live in the Valley, or 3 percent.

Elsewhere, Bethlehem Steel did hire blacks in large numbers. At its biggest plant, Sparrows Point in Baltimore Harbor, a quarter of the work force was black men. Many had come north from Southern farms as part of the ''Great Migration'' of the World War I era.

That migration left out the Lehigh Valley. Blacks heading to the industrial North preferred big cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Detroit. There, they could live in black communities that already existed and work in factories for higher pay than they would get in Bethlehem.

Even if they had come to the Lehigh Valley, they wouldn't have been welcome. It was an insular place where people felt uncomfortable with anyone or anything that was different.

A small number of blacks had lived in the Valley since Colonial days. The first came in the 18th century from the West Indies as missionary converts to the Moravian Church. Others were slaves. Though slavery ended in Pennsylvania during the Revolution, blacks born into servitude before 1776 could be held for life. As a result, Pennsylvania still had slaves in the 1850s.

Some free blacks came to the Valley in the 1820s to help build the Lehigh Canal. Part of Allentown's 1st Ward along the Lehigh River was nicknamed Mingo after Santo Domingo, a largely black island nation that today is the Dominican Republic.

When the Lehigh Zinc Co. and the Lehigh Valley Railroad came to South Bethlehem in the 1850s, some of their executives had black servants. In the 20th century, Schwab employed almost all blacks on Loretto, his private railroad car. ''They regarded themselves as a proud elite,'' notes Amidon, who has interviewed descendants of many Bethlehem blacks. ''They were better educated in many cases than the local whites.''

Yet blacks were outsiders, as the Valley's Germans had been in the 18th century. Isolated because they didn't speak English, the Germans drew inward. In eastern Pennsylvania, they created a cultural enclave and harbored a distrust of non-Germans. For example, they generally accepted Jewish immigrants from the German states in the 1840s and '50s, but were cool to Russian and Polish Jews who arrived in the 1890s. Any outsider would have had trouble cracking into the Pennsylvania German community of that era.

Events in the Midwest reinforced negative feelings toward blacks. In the coal mines of southern Illinois and the lead mines of south central Missouri, they were brought in as scabs during strikes in 1917. Work forces made up largely of white men whose ancestors had migrated from the South rose up against them in a spasm of violence. Word spread that blacks allowed themselves to be used as strikebreakers.

Closer to home was a horrific episode that might have been on the minds of Bethlehem Steel officials  the August 1911 slaying of black steelworker Zachariah Walker in Coatesville, Chester County.